Welcome! My name is Susan Chambre and welcome to my wiki for teachers of struggling writers. For the past 11 years I have been teaching in elementary public schools in New York City and Bergen County, New Jersey. While working in NYC schools, I was an inclusion classroom teacher, AIS provider, and teacher-trainer. For the past six years I have been working in Ridgewood, NJ as a resource center teacher. Currently I am enrolled in the CLAIR doctoral program at Fordham University for a PhD in contemporary literacies.

This wiki is a resource for teachers who work with learning disabled (LD) students who struggle with the writing process. Over the past 11 years I have taught students who have had difficulty with getting their ideas onto paper. Issues that I have encountered have been:

• Difficulty generating ideas.
• Expressive language delays that impact student's orally expressing their ideas before writing them.
• Lack of detailed writing.
• Students who lack stamina when writing.

How can this wiki aid me in teaching these struggling students? This wiki will look at two research validated stratagies that have promising results for students who struggle.

• The first strategy is SRSD developed by Steve Graham and Karen Harris from the Vanderbuilt University.
• The second education approach will review the work of sentence combining popularized by Frank O'Hara and subsequently studied by numerous modern scholars.

While there are many strategies available to teachers working with LD students, I have focused this wiki on two different tools. Since writing is a dynamic process and each student is an individual, I hope you will take away stratagies that can be integrated into your own classroom instruction.

Finally on the lighter side: